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One man's excuse...Wed, 17 Jan 2018 08:49:22 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.110650869Common Grounds – Magic Rock and Dark Woods Coffeehttp://spiritedmatters.com/2018/01/common-grounds-magic-rock-dark-woods-coffee/
http://spiritedmatters.com/2018/01/common-grounds-magic-rock-dark-woods-coffee/#respondWed, 17 Jan 2018 08:47:00 +0000http://spiritedmatters.com/?p=7207Continue reading "Common Grounds – Magic Rock and Dark Woods Coffee"]]>When it comes to drinks which don’t contain alcohol, there is one that I am almost as obsessive over as booze – coffee. While I’m generally not a fan of coffee beers, there’s one that combines beer, coffee and whisky in a way that I can’t ignore: Magic Rock Common Grounds.

The standard way of making a craft coffee beer is now fairly set:

be a craft brewer

identify a craft coffee roaster

obtain some beans

stick them in your beer

tell everyone about your incredible craft collaboration.

The level of cynicism in this process varies from beer to beer, with many great collaborations popping up. Some folks will just add some coffee and hope, but others will work carefully with the coffee roaster to find beans with flavours that will complement the beer’s recipe. However, they are normally one-offs and don’t hang around much.

Magic Rock and Dark Woods

Magic Rock, the centrepiece of Huddersfield’s surprisingly (to a filthy Londoner, like me) active brewing scene, do things a bit differently with Common Grounds. They hooked up with local roaster Dark Woods as their source for beans, but added an extra step into the beer and coffee combination: ex-bourbon casks.

Ageing beer in casks has very much become a thing (I still blame Innis & Gunn, even if they’ve given up on using whole casks and now just feed them into a woodchipper before stirring the resulting mess into a washing machine full of their ‘beer’) and coffee has very much taken up the gauntlet as well. While there is a history to it – coffee beans were transported and stored in casks in ye olden dayes, and there were almost certainly former whiskey casks used at some point – getting flavour from the cask into the beans is now the focus.

Dark Woods store unroasted coffee beans in a bourbon cask for a few weeks. The beans are then roasted and some goes off to Magic Rock for inclusion in the beer. The rest goes up on their shop, and I’ve bought it when I’ve seen it – it doesn’t last long. The most recent batch used Yirgacheffe beans from Ethiopia.

Dark Woods Common Grounds Barrel Aged Yirgacheffe – barrel #124

Brewed with Hario V60. 17g beans to 250g water. Medium grind. 30 second bloom with agitation. Two-part pour, with a swirl of the coffee after each. Brewtime: ~3.5 minutes.

Prebrew, the beans are very chocolatey, with a touch of caramel sweetness – definitely some bourbony hints, but concentrated.

When brewed, the caramel notes sit at the back along, with acidic fruitiness through the middle. There’s some of the funkiness I expect from Yirgacheffe, but it’s all tied up with the caramel in the background.

Magic Rock Common Grounds Triple Coffee Porter

The beer is part of the brewery’s core range, although there is a barrel-aged version that seems to pop up at a similar time to the Dark Woods coffee – if they’re maturing the beer in the cask that was used to age the coffee, then I definitely need to find some.

The schtick is seven coffees added at three times during the brew, hence the ‘triple coffee porter’ moniker.

Palate: Starts with sweetness and a touch of creaminess before the cold brew notes from the nose pile in. There’s a pleasant sourness from the coffee with hazelnuts and some bittersweet chocolate – like someone mixed coffee and hazelnut yoghurt together.

Finish: The sourness returns along with the cream: more yoghurt that disappears to leave bittersweet beans.

The sour fruit from the coffee is here as well – it’s one of my favourite flavours in coffee and it plays a key balancing act in the beer, stopping it from getting too sweet or bitter.

While I generally stay away from coffee beers – despite years of drinking way too much coffee, I’m still overly sensitive to caffeine, which makes them dangerous to drink in the evening – this has a place in my fridge. It might not contain a lot of barrel-aged coffee (my initial reason for jumping on it), but the beer is definitely focused around integrating coffee character. At about £2 a can, it’s my current go-to for dark and chocolatey porters.

]]>http://spiritedmatters.com/2018/01/common-grounds-magic-rock-dark-woods-coffee/feed/07207Mustard and Coffee – an analogy taken too farhttp://spiritedmatters.com/2017/12/mustard-coffee-analogy/
http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/12/mustard-coffee-analogy/#commentsThu, 28 Dec 2017 23:16:49 +0000http://spiritedmatters.com/?p=7192Continue reading "Mustard and Coffee – an analogy taken too far"]]>The internet is a dangerous place and Facebook is a collapsing mine of peril. Be wary of participating in ‘discussion’ as sometimes a throwaway comment can lead to blogging…

Malt Maniacs & Friends is a large whisky group over on Facebook, full of people who like talking toot about whisky. A recent innocent thread asking for recommendations of which whisky blogs to read (which shamefully only mentioned my esteemed organ on a single occasion) followed the regular path of these things: fevered replying, fevered replying to the replies, slow fading towards a quiet death, revival via sarchasm and then back to the fevered again. This time I joined in the secondary feveredness, and a tossed-off reply to a comment about wine casks and the perverts who enjoy whisky matured in them has led to this post.

I famously (for some values of ‘famously’) dislike all wine-cask-matured whiskies, apart from the ones I like, which I normally really like. Serge Valentin of Whisky Fun, a gentleman of great taste and discretion, normally agrees with me on this point, and dropped these words of wisdom into the thread:

I love coffee and I love mustard, but I’d never put mustard into my coffee.

Unfortunately, I am a man who loves experimentation and will try anything at least once. Often only once (Marmite, red wine and crème de menthe works better than you’d expect, but it’s not an experience I will be repeating), but not even trying the once feels like cheating.

Challenge accepted.

Coffee and Mustard

I started with my usual brewing regime for pour-over coffee made with a V60 – 17g of coffee for 250g of water. I do everything by weight because:

it’s more accurate

it’s more pretentious.

I added 1.5g of Colman’s mustard powder and then made the coffee in my usual way: 30 second bloom with constant agitation, followed by a two-part pulsed pour favouring the edges of the cone, with a swirl of the V60 between the pours. Brew time was about 3 minutes 15 seconds. If you don’t know what the above means, you are a better person than I.

Here are my notes for the resulting cup of coffee:

Nose: Hints of berries and dark chocolate, but with an unexpected savoury dryness. Also mild eye-watering after sniffing hard and a general numbness spreading from the nose across the face.

Palate: Rich earthiness washes across the palate until stopped by a wall of green onion. Sharp edged mustard flavour, without heat, pushes back across the palate, interrupted by a big core of mulchy berries, burnt toast and umami.

Finish: Pinches of spice appear, pushed back by bitter chocolate and char. Soft mustard heat lingers. For a long time. About an hour. I think I’m having heart palpitations. Things all seem weird.

The mustard does not in this case improve the coffee experience.

I’ve done it now, so I don’t need to again. Which is the same reaction I had to that Gordon & MacPhail Caol Ila that was finished in a Tokaji cask…

Update: Serge Valentin and Angus McRaild took up my challenge and posted a selection of mustard tasting notes over on WhiskyFun.com. Well played, gentlemen.

]]>http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/12/mustard-coffee-analogy/feed/27192Chefas Rigal 81 – My Favourite Whisky Labelhttp://spiritedmatters.com/2017/12/chefas-rigal-81/
http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/12/chefas-rigal-81/#respondWed, 27 Dec 2017 08:17:43 +0000http://spiritedmatters.com/?p=7178Continue reading "Chefas Rigal 81 – My Favourite Whisky Label"]]>I love whisky labels. While regulations for what appears on a bottle are strict in most parts of the world, making it a challenge to be creative, there’s a whole segment of the market where they don’t care: counterfeit bottlings. I’m not talking about the intricately constructed fakes that pass undetected around the collectors’ world, I mean the dodgy bottles that are obviously fake to any whisky fan, including a lot of the folks who buy them.

From the infamous Johnnie Worker Red Labial to the design-your-own-label bottlings from the Aberlour website where enterprising individuals have added a vintage that predates the distillery’s construction, there are some obvious fakes out there. However, for me, one takes the biscuit: Chefas Rigal 81.

I don’t the know provenance of the photo of this whisky, but it appeared on the internet a few years back and has been posted many times since. What impresses me most is that almost everything on the label is incorrect:

Firstly, there’s the name. It’s obviously a play on Chivas Regal 18 year old, but it’s been reproduced phonetically by someone I assume is not a native English speaker. I suspect that this may be how it is pronounced in some parts of Egypt.

Then we move on to the age. When it comes to bold claims, 81 years old is impressive – the oldest commercially released whisky is Gordon & MacPhail’s Mortlach 75 Year Old. While there’s a chance there was distilling happening in Egypt back then – it had been a British Protectorate and while we Brits left destruction behind us as the empire contracted, we did also leave a load of distilleries – I’d be very surprised if this was 1930s-vintage Egyptian whisky. The selection of 81 struck me as strange, until I remembered that Arabic is Egypt’s official language and it’s written right to left: another nod to the Chivas 18.

Next up is a departure from the bottle’s pretend-Scottish roots: the references to it being ‘Made in Egypt’. While I can’t find any record of distilleries in Egypt today, there is a thriving drinks market, so there’s probably one somewhere. Not only does this bottle proudly proclaim its source as Egypt across the centre and bottom of the label, but also in the crest at the top. The crest itself, and the rest of the background of the label, reminds me of the graphics of a ZX Spectrum conversion of a 1980’s arcade game: vaguely the same shape, but missing the core concept by a country mile and gussying things up with weird colours. To add some more fun to the mix, there’s a good chance that this is not actually made in Egypt, almost certainly being at least in part some imported bulk whisky, maybe mixed with locally made booze. And E150a.

They’ve covered all the bases when it comes to strength: 40% vol and 40% alc/vol are exactly the same thing, and 40GL – 40 degrees Gay-Lussac – is only very slightly different (measured at 15ºC rather than 20ºC). And while the use of the oversized e on the left side of the label implies that the quantity of the contents is estimated, they don’t actually have any indication of how much liquid is in the bottle, which makes it less useful.

Down at the bottom there are three lines that make me inordinately happy:

Line 1 – “Blended and blended and bottled by”: blended twice, it seems.

Line 2 – “Chefas Broters Ltd”: we’re back to phonetic spelling again.

Line 3 – “Distillers Keth AB55 5BS Egypt”: this is my favourite bit. They’ve misspelled Keith – home of Chivas Brothers central: Strathisla distillery – used Strathisla’s actual postcode, and popped an Egypt on the end for good measure. Genius.

That leaves us with the label’s crowning achievement. The focus. The bit that tells you what is actually in the bottle:

WH SKY

Good work Egyptian fakers. You are the winners.

]]>http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/12/chefas-rigal-81/feed/07178Bass Prince’s Ale 1929http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/12/bass-princes-ale-1929/
http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/12/bass-princes-ale-1929/#commentsMon, 11 Dec 2017 23:24:37 +0000http://spiritedmatters.com/?p=7155Continue reading "Bass Prince’s Ale 1929"]]>There are some bottle of booze that have mystique. Bottles that people search for and keep, opening them only special occasions. For me, one of the bottles that I’ve coveted since hearing about it is an 80 year old beer. So, here’s the oldest beer I’ve drunk, opened at the celebration of someone becoming old: an excellent occasion and an incredible bottle – Bass Prince’s Ale from 1929.

Bass Prince’s Ale was brewed back in 1929, with the mash started by the then Prince of Wales. According to Mike Peterson’s page, the beer was bottled and on sale in 1930 for £5 a pint – that’s equivalent to somewhere around £300 a bottle today*. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t seem to have sold all that quickly and was still available 16 years later at the end of World War II. During that time, the prince had become King Edward VIII, caused a constitutional crisis, abdicated, married Wallis Simpson, moved to France, fled the Nazi advance and been moved to the Bahamas (maybe due to rumoured fascist sympathies), where he sat out the war as governor, before returning to France when it had ended.

It is not known whether he tried ‘his’ beer.

The cork: still relatively intact

The Prince’s Ale is variously described as a barley wine or old ale online, but it looks to me like an old school Burton Ale. According to Martyn Cornell’s (excellent) Amber, Gold and Black, the style flourished from the mid-1800s until the post-war years, disappearing into obscurity by the 1950s, in a similar way to Edward VIII but without the Nazi rumours. It grew out of the Baltic export ales of the early 1800s, developing into a lower ABV variant with less sweetness and more bitterness over the years. It needed cellaring for months before serving, and I’d guess that it almost certainly had some degree of secondary fermentation going on during that time – sour beers aren’t a new or strictly continental-European thing.

These days there aren’t any beers still carrying the Burton moniker to indicate this style, as Burton became famous for its pale ales and the name became synonymous with them. However, there are still a lot of medium/high-strength traditional ales with solid bitterness and a bit of sweetness, so the style lives on through many of today’s barley wines.

If you look carefully, there’s the beginning of a red diamond on the label…

Bass started marking its Burton ales with a red diamond in 1857, and the Prince’s Ale carries the mark on its label. According to Ron Pattinson, it had an OG of 1112 and an FG of 1029, which would give an ABV of 11-12%, which is at the high-end of Burton and definitely tips its hat at barley wines. It’s the sort of beer that should age well, and it was probably tasting better at the end of its years on sale than it did at the beginning.

The wax on the bottle was still remarkably intact and the cork was in pretty good condition. This didn’t stop it breaking, and we had to drink the beer around a few floaty bits. It poured a vivid red, bright and very clear. There was no carbonation, but after 87 years in the bottle with a slightly shrivelled cork, that was not entirely unexpected.

Palate: Biscuity and sour at first, with a touch of ashy bitterness. Then all the fruit from the nose rushes in. However, the fruit hits a wall, and leaves a gap on the palate. It’s tannic and dry on the other side, and in the middle of the void there’s a core of boiled sweets: red flavoured and dipped in sour sugar. Green leaves and riverbank mud sit underneath, along with dark chocolate and red wine.

The sourness suggests that at some point in the past nine decades it had become infected, and a secondary fermentation had happened along the way. It might have been since it was bottled, but I’d guess it happened between brewing and bottling – there was a distinct resemblance to the fruity sourness of Rodenbach, Duchesse de Bourgogne and other Flemish red ales, which are constructed around a sour secondary fermentation. With Rodenbach’s style of beer originating, or so the stories tell us, from its master brewer learning how to age and blend beer in England, this shouldn’t be all that surprising. Creating an old or stock ale by ageing a strong Burton before blending it with younger beer was well known back in the 1920s. Prince’s Ale could well have gone on to be aged, if the Prince hadn’t kicked off the mash and created a marketing opportunity.

The Bass Prince’s Ale is an impressive beer that I would have happily polished off a whole bottle of. However, not everyone agreed, with birthday boy McSpillin commenting ‘It smells like piss’ and almost everyone else turning down the opportunity for more than a sip – I will admit that it did have a hint of something ‘familiar‘ on the nose. We didn’t finish the bottle, leaving it mostly intact for Dornoch Distillery yeast necromancer Simon to work his dark magics on. One day, years from now, we may have a whisky on the market made from wash fermented with 1929 Bass yeast. Keep an eye out in 2029, the 100th anniversary of Prince Edward popping by the Bass brewery…

Many thanks to Mr MacRaild for opening the bottle and letting me have a taste. Angus is, as we agreed before he’d let me try the beer, best.

* calculated using the Measuring Worth calculator and focusing on real prices/historic standard of living prices/historic opportunity cost – full details here

]]>http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/12/bass-princes-ale-1929/feed/27155Aldi Irish Reserve 26 Year Old Single Malt Whiskeyhttp://spiritedmatters.com/2017/11/aldi-irish-26-single-malt-whiskey/
http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/11/aldi-irish-26-single-malt-whiskey/#commentsWed, 15 Nov 2017 00:03:24 +0000http://spiritedmatters.com/?p=7137Continue reading "Aldi Irish Reserve 26 Year Old Single Malt Whiskey"]]>It’s Christmas. As someone who works for a whisky shop, I’ve got used to the 1 November festive season starter, but it seems that it’s still grating for most. However, there’s something to help get you through the long weeks until legitimate advent anticipation arrives in December: Christmas booze releases. This time – Aldi Irish Reserve 26 Year Old Single Malt Whiskey.

Old Irish whiskey has recently become a thing. There wasn’t much of it about in years gone by, with occasional releases popping up from Midleton and Bushmills, accompanied by huge price tags and minor flurries of attention. However, with the growth of Ireland as a distilling nation – 30+ distilleries are in various states of building, licensing and production, up from three a mere five years ago – has come more old juice. The Aldi Irish Reserve suggests that there is more of it out there than we thought.

Where’s it from?

At the moment there are a few casks of single malt whiskey distilled in the early 1990s knocking around. They’ve appeared in a variety of guises, from Teeling Distillery bottlings to German indie releases, but it seems they are from the same parcel of casks. There are a number of theories about them…

The least controversial idea is that they are from Bushmills. Around 1990, Cooley (then owned by the Teeling family) had only just started distilling single malt (1989 seems to have been their first year of production). Midleton may have been producing single malt (a rumour I’ve recently heard and am still investigating), but it doesn’t look to have been going anywhere but into the distillery’s blends. That leaves the only other operating distillery in Ireland at the time as the source for these whiskeys: Bushmills, well-known for being Ireland’s main producer of single malt whiskey.

How did it get to Aldi?

The path from Bushmills to landing on the shelves in Aldi is less clear. For a while, my theory has been that Cooley bought some casks to prop up their malt production in the early days of Tyrconnell, and that not all of them were used. By the time the Teeling family sold the distillery a few years ago, the whiskey had started to become quite special, so they took at least some of the casks as part of the deal and brought them along when they started up Teeling Whiskey. Some of these casks have made their way into Teeling releases. However, other similar casks have ended up on the open market, where they were bought by independent bottlers and whoever produced this release for Aldi.

Whether the casks did come from the Teelings, from the new owners of Cooley (Beam Inc, now Beam Suntory), or from other people who owned casks like these, I do not know. And every time I guess, I find out more information that makes me doubt my theory. More research required…

Edit: since writing this post, I’ve had a few folks ping me quietly and reveal a few other potential sources for these casks (and a few others that are on the market). My Teeling theory is almost certainly wrong. Thank you lovely anonymous people!

The single cask releases – normally bottled at cask strength, un-chillfiltered and with natural colour – have been almost universally praised. 90+ point scores are common and their reputation has grown along with their price: as of writing they hover around the £250 mark.

Aldi Irish Reserve 26 Year Old Single Malt Whiskey

This Aldi Irish Reserve is a different beast: probably coloured and chillfiltered, and diluted to 40%.

It’s also £39.99 a bottle.

But what does it taste like?

Nose: Loads of fruit with a backing of grassy olive oil: pineapple, unripe mango, sharp apples and ripe pears. Candied notes roll in, with barley sugar and travel sweets joined by real Haribo Goldbären. Wrapping that is an oaky surround: sappy touches with a bit of varnish.

Palate: Loads of juice: all the fruit from the nose squished into a Capri-Sun packet. Orange sorbet/sherbet. A bit of fruity olive oil behind the tropical notes. The oak is impressively controlled, poking its head up at the end, with a handful of splinters and a bit of polish.

Finish: Here the wood makes itself known: sharp dark oak, varnish and polish. It fades, leaving tannic touches down the side of the tongue that stick around and a hint of Coke syrup through the middle that doesn’t.

It’s good. I’m rather pleased that I trekked to the far northern reaches of the Jubilee line in search of it. It’s a toned down version of the full-strength single casks, but it’s still overflowing with fruity goodness. Reports floating in today from across the internet agree and it seems that Aldi have struck gold. People have realised, so I suspect this won’t last for long.

Thanks to Adam of Malt (and elsewhere) for confirming that this was worth a punt. He took on the task of reviewing the Glen Marnoch 29 Year Old, which doesn’t seem to have been quite as joy filled.

]]>http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/11/aldi-irish-26-single-malt-whiskey/feed/37137More whisky than whiskyhttp://spiritedmatters.com/2017/10/more-whisky-than-whisky/
http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/10/more-whisky-than-whisky/#commentsSun, 22 Oct 2017 11:40:13 +0000http://spiritedmatters.com/?p=7125Continue reading "More whisky than whisky"]]>There has been much discussion of late about the creations of Lost Spirits, a company working on speeding up the ageing of spirits. While the process and ideas, and the surrounding recent furore, are interesting, the discussion unearthed a few things for me that dig much deeper into the world of drinks.

I recently sat down to play The Turing Test, a computer game featuring a series of puzzle rooms, which quietly examines the concepts of artificial intelligence in between puzzles. Not long into the game, the ideas of John Searle‘s Chinese Room thought experiment are introduced. Here’s a simplistic take on it:

Imagine there’s a room with two slots on the wall on the outside. You pass notes written in Chinese through one slot, and answers written in Chinese come out of the other. The output is the perfect response to the input and forms a conversation.

In Searle’s original thought experiment, he firsts imagines a computer in the room doing the reading and writing, and then a non-Chinese-speaking person with a book to look up the answers. While he was concerned with the concepts of mind and artificial intelligence, a more general point hit me: if the inputs and outputs are the same, then does it matter what’s in the room?

one of them was made in a distillery that has been around for 200 years and spent years in a cask

the other was made in a few months by someone with a machine that makes whisky.

The question: which one is best and why?

I got a much larger response than expected, and have been digging through the answers ever since. Two topics of discussion especially interested me, examining what we enjoy about whisky and how we choose it, and looking into the potential future of whisky making.

Consistent inconsistency

Many of the answers to the question talked about how important the process was, even though I tried to state that the process didn’t make the resulting whisky any better or worse.

There was a fear that the consistency of a machine might wipe out the small differences that a more hands-on approach generally leads to. This felt ironic, as currently, in the concrete example of Lost Spirits, I assume the output is more variable than that of long-running distillers. Years of effort into assuring consistency through in-distillery production and blending before bottling make most traditional producers more machine-like than the machine.

While most whisky producers strive for consistent products, increasingly we are seeing more that do not. While Springbank is famous for its varying batches of the same expression, it’s producers like Mark Reynier’s Waterford Distillery that exemplify this approach. He and his team are focused on the raw ingredients and the amplification of their character, even at the expense of having a consistent ongoing product in the future. It’s an approach that appeals to me and many in the whisky geek community, even if Reynier’s rhetoric has annoyed me since his Bruichladdich days. As we achieve even more consistency of production I see the niche of inconsistent releases being increasingly explored by both lovers of the results and canny business people.

The rise of the machines

The other direction of discussion that most suprised me, was a look into the future – people focused on the machine and its implications.

In the speculative world of my question, the machine has already reached the point of creating whisky that tastes as good as traditional methods. If that’s the case, then there are two strands ahead in the hypothetical future:

the machine continues to improve, making whisky that tastes better than traditionally produced drams

the price of the machine and the liquid it creates will drop.

This is the story across the whole of human history – technology, whether it be agriculture or microchips, reduces the cost of making things. That cost may be money, but also covers time, effort and everything else that goes into creating an item. As machine-made whisky improves, as it inevitably will, the price will drop and traditional producers will need to pay much more attention to this new technology.

The more things change

In the end, this is nothing new. Whisky has changed a lot since the days of farmers making spirit from their leftover grain. Commercial yeasts, malting technology, modern mills, still-heating methods, energy reclamation, warehousing techniques: the list goes on. What is produced as whisky today might be recognisable to the farm distillers of the 1700s, but it’s definitely not the same thing.

But this is what the industry does: it adapts. While the spirit changes, there is still a niche for the more traditional and for flavours that have been lost. Diageo’s not only reopening Port Ellen and Brora so as to be able to stick their names on labels: the lost flavour profile of those those distilleries is in demand.

In the end, denouncing technology is only going to hold back the tide for a small amount of time. No matter how many clogs you throw in the mills*, technology will win out in the end. I don’t see traditionally made whisky disappearing any time soon, but then again, how many distilleries still have their own floor maltings, use direct firing on their stills and use brewers yeasts?

Frankenwhisky

From reading the reports of Lost Spirits’s results of ageing spirits in their THEA One reactor (THEA standing for ‘Targeted Hyper-Esterification Aging’) , it seems that they are on their way, but the resulting ‘whisky’ isn’t quite there yet. Part of the wonder of technology is that it generally gets better over time. Unless you believe that it is impossible to replicate ageing via technological means – which is a philosophical argument that yet again reminds me of Searle’s Chinese room and arguments about the possibility of artificial intelligence – we will inevitably one day get great whisky that has been aged quickly in a machine of some kind.

I think of this in a similar way to machine-made clothes. We’re now at a stage where handmade clothes can still surpass the machine-made, but cost much more and the quality gap is constantly decreasing. We’ve even reached a point where the romance of having handmade clothes is starting to wane**, something I can see in the future of whisky once machine-aged spirits start to catch up with more traditional products.

But these are the early days and technology does not always move at the speed of recent innovations. I see this as a slow march towards a future where in the end there will be a lot of tasty things to drink.

Do sherry casks dream of THEA reactors?

In the end, I come back to Searle’s Chinese Room when thinking about where I stand at the moment. As you’d expect, his points and arguments are more nuanced than mine, but his interpretation of the thought experiment fits in more than I expected with the impact of technology on whisky. In the Chinese Room, Searle argues that the computer that can seemingly hold a conversation in Chinese does not understand Chinese. However, it does simulate an understanding.

I have no problem with something that simulates a process and produces something great, but I’m still someone who loves to know and understand the process. While the outcome may be the same, the process is not, and in the world of whisky, that’s something that’s still important to me.

Thank you to everyone who replied (and is still replying) to my Facebook post – the comments are well worth a read. It’s given me lots to think about, some of which is above. It’s also supplied some excellent sarcastic answers, for which I applaud you all.

The picture at the top of the post is from the Blade Runner 2049 and features three characters which for me dig into the idea of ‘process’ when it comes to mind/humanity/artificial intelligence and all that kind of thing. Anyways, go and see Blade Runner 2049: it is excellent.

* While writing this, I’ve discovered that the traditional ‘French workers protesting against mechanisation by throwing their sabots (clogs) into the machines’ etymology of the word sabotage is almost certainly incorrect. It seems to instead be due to the clattering of slowly walking be-clogged workers, on go-slow orders to peacefully protest. However, I like the image of clogs being thrown into machines, so I’m still going to use it.

** I don’t see whisky being made by enslaved children any time soon, so this might be a little hyperbolic.

]]>http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/10/more-whisky-than-whisky/feed/17125Port Ellen and Brora: The Resurrectionhttp://spiritedmatters.com/2017/10/port-ellen-and-brora-resurrection/
http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/10/port-ellen-and-brora-resurrection/#commentsTue, 10 Oct 2017 07:37:15 +0000http://spiritedmatters.com/?p=7108Continue reading "Port Ellen and Brora: The Resurrection"]]>Yesterday’s announcement from Diageo about the ‘reopening’ of Port Ellen and Brora caught the whisky world unawares. At first, it made no sense to me, but after a day of mulling it over, and reading interviews and the internet, it’s started to come together. Here’s a round up of what we know and my thoughts.

A short history of Port Ellen

For a distillery with such a legendary status, the history of PE is surprisingly short. While it started in 1825, the distillery as we know it appears in 1967. It was rebuilt after a 1930 mothballing, with its stills doubled to four, and started making whisky again. In 1973 its drum maltings were installed and in 1983 it closed – it was only open for 16 years. With Caol Ila rebuilt in the early 1970s, it was the obvious choice to disappear in the downturn, especially as the site could then be dedicated to malting.

Port Ellen’s remaining warehouses – right on the beach

In 1990, the stills disappeared, shipped abroad, and the distillery buildings were repurposed or knocked down. The maltings remain, and now supply malt to most of Islay. To start up a Port Ellen distillery again, they’ll need to rebuild it pretty much from scratch.

A short history of Brora

Brora’s history is a only a few years longer than Port Ellen’s, but again the distillery as we know it was around for a surprisingly short time. Founded by the Duke of Sutherland as Clynelish, it ran pretty much constantly through until the late 1960s. A new distillery was built next door, and the two ran in parallel from 1967 until 1969, when the old distillery closed. However, it shortly reopened as Brora and started distilling again, initially filling in a gap in smoky whisky production due to Caol Ila being out of operation at the time.

Brora distillery – relatively intact

It continued until 1983, when it closed again thanks to the industry downturn that also did for Port Ellen. Like Port Ellen, it was an obvious choice to close, with another, more modern distillery next door, in this case literally built to replace it.

they will probably release whiskies at 12 years old, but aren’t counting out releases of younger spirit

both distilleries will produce about 800,000 litres of alcohol per year, making them Diageo’s second and third smallest distilleries – bigger than Royal Lochnagar, just smaller than Oban

they will use barley peated to about 20ppm – the medium peated character of the mid/late-1970s and early 1980s

they will replicate the distillation regime and spirit character where possible

they will be using worm tubs at Brora

they will fill and mature on site.

That all sounds good, although as the ranty Dead Bottle Collective has pointed out (warning: link contains disrespect for Brora that can never be forgiven. And swearing), this is not, especially in the case of Port Ellen as simple as ‘turning the stills on again’.

What do they need to do at Brora?

When I visited Clynelish back in 2012, I peered through the dirty windows of the Brora still house and was confronted by bird-poo-spattered stills that would need some serious work to get running again. A listing with Historic Scotland that restricted upgrade work to the buildings was also a major obstacle to any rebuilding.

The Brora still house in 2012. I hear it’s looking a bit more spruced up these days

Despite still being listed, it seems that Diageo have come to an arrangement, as tales of them clearing up the place and polishing up the stills for at least the past year have now emerged. They will still need to refurbish the equipment and plumb everything in again, along with bringing in new heating and whatever other innovations that have appeared over the past 34 years that they will inevitably want to use.

They also have warehousing already, and with some movement of casks down to Diageo’s main maturation facilities (most Clynelish is already matured elsewhere and the on-site warehouses are filled with a mixture of casks from distilleries across Scotland) they should have space to store enough casks to fulfil the promise of on-site filling and maturation.

Is there any of Port Ellen left?

Port Ellen doesn’t actually exist any more. The famous white-wall-with-the-distillery-name-on that’s at the top of this post is one of the remaining warehouses, and pretty much all that remains of the distillery buildings.

The courtyard in the centre is where the action will take place. The famous warehouse wall is in the middle at the bottom

In the picture above you can see the double-pagoda roof of the original distillery in the centre. The plan is to to drop a new distillery into the courtyard to the south of it – the site of the old distillery. The warehouses are there already, right by the sea, and with a bit of a clear out they’ll be ready to go.

New Production

Not many details have been given of production, other than ‘replicating where possible the distillation regime and spirit character of the original distilleries’ and ‘cask filling and traditional warehousing will also be included on the sites of both distilleries’. However, as they’ve not even put in for planning permission to build them yet, I’d not expect them to have that locked down yet.

The Brora filling store – almost ready to go again

One question that came up online, was what barley they’ll use. Other than Dr Nick’s comments that it will be 20ppm, we don’t know what it’ll be yet, and I would hope not – things change quickly in the barley world, and we don’t know what strains will be in vogue and available in 2020, when they will actually need the barley. Both distilleries used standard distillers barley, focusing on yield, back in the 1970s, so a switch to heritage varieties wouldn’t fit in with the plan.

Oliver Klimek mentioned on Twitter that he hoped they would use floor-malted barley, which I think would be a mistake – the whiskies that made both distilleries famous would have been made using drum-malted barley:

Port Ellen may have used floor-malted barley between its 1967 reopening and the 1973 installation of the big maltings, but the 1970s whiskies it is now best known for would have used drum malt

Brora last used its own malt in 1965 according to Angus MacRaild, probably switching to malt from Ord when it reopened in 1969.

If they’re trying to replicate the spirit character of the distilleries at close, then using Port Ellen’s own drum malt and Talisker-spec malt from Ord is probably the way to go – options that fit in with Diageo’s plans.

My thoughts

At first I couldn’t work out the point of reopening the distilleries. However, a comment on Facebook by Jordan Devereux made it all click – ‘They are basically going to be new distilleries. At best I expect this will be like the resurrection of Ardbeg’.

The resurrection of the names will help them sell 15 years from now, when ongoing spirit finally hits the market, but I think the main point is that Diageo wants a pair of new distilleries to add to their portfolio.

At its heart, Diageo is a blending company, and the malt distilleries exist to provide blocks of flavour for the blenders to work with. Spirit with the character of 1970s/1980s Port Ellen – medium-peated Islay malt – and Brora – combining smoke with the traditional Clynelish waxiness – isn’t made elsewhere in Diageo’s estate, so their return makes sense. There’s no doubling up of production, it’s old-school flavours being made available again.

Adding these two distilleries gets Diageo not only two new flavours to add to its palette, but also a pair of new single malts with historic names. It now all starts to make sense.

]]>http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/10/port-ellen-and-brora-resurrection/feed/37108The Malt Whisky Trail – a wander through Speysidehttp://spiritedmatters.com/2017/07/malt-whisky-trail/
http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/07/malt-whisky-trail/#respondThu, 20 Jul 2017 13:14:50 +0000http://spiritedmatters.com/?p=7084Continue reading "The Malt Whisky Trail – a wander through Speyside"]]>I like Scotland. Despite living in London and growing up on the south coast of England, I’ve been making the pilgrimage north of the wall pretty much every year for the last 35. One thing has been constant through all those years: brown signs telling me the way to the next distillery on the Malt Whisky Trail.

My first distillery visit was to Glenfiddich at the tender age of five, and it inspired me. Three decades later, I now write about drinks professionally and spend almost every waking hour investigating the wonderful world of whisky. As the Malt Whisky Trail started me on my journey all those years ago, I couldn’t turn down an invite to visit again.

On holiday in Scotland with only a couple of days free, I couldn’t fit in all nine stops of the trail. However, with the help of Malt Whisky Trail podcast host Samantha Staniforth as driver and guide, I managed to fit in most of them.

The Glenlivet

The Glenlivet warehouses

We started our journey at Glenlivet, a distillery that I have somehow never visited before. One of the biggest names in whisky around the world, the visitor centre is appropriately shiny. But for me, the most important thing is the tour, and it ticked all the boxes – despite the distillery being closed down for summer maintenance, it was still alive with activity. A mid-way pit stop in the warehouses for a dram pulled straight from the cask was a great interlude before a few drams back in the visitor centre, watched over by a portrait of distillery founder George Smith.

Cardhu

Next on the itinerary was Cardhu, a hidden gem that I’ve been meaning to visit for years. It’s a few minutes drive from the A95, the main road that snakes its way through Speyside from Aviemore to Keith. While distilleries pop up every few minutes as you barrel along, it’s worth taking a cross-country route to visit Cardhu.

They have cows at Cardhu – this is Hector

I first made it to Cardhu years ago, but having missed the last tour of the day, we just shared a dram with the visitor centre staff before heading back out into the snow. This time I got to see what happens inside, experiencing the sights and smells of the distillery as well as the taste of the finished whisky, including the new distillery-only release.

Behind the distillery is the externally unassuming Johnnie Walker House – Cardhu was the first distillery bought by Johnnie Walker and the connection to the world’s biggest selling Scotch whisky has been strong ever since. When it comes to locations for a whisky tasting, the lounge of the Johnnie Walker house was the most impressive of my trip, with leather sofas and an open fireplace, as well as a huge slate rendering of the Johnnie Walker Striding Man logo hanging above us as we tasted our way through the Cardhu range.

Strathisla

To start the second day of my tour, we headed out to Strathisla, sister distillery to Glenlivet. I’d heard that the distillery is picturesque, and it lived up to its reputation, despite the dark clouds overhead and constant drizzle – the definition of ‘dreich’.

It’s just as pretty inside the visitor centre, but as soon as you pass through the door into the distillery it’s a different world. Old fashioned and with every ounce of space used, Strathisla is the exact opposite of Glenlivet. To round off the tour, we tried a selection of drams that go into making Chivas Regal, the blend whisky which has Strathisla at its heart. As a grain whisky fan, the 12 year old grain whisky, rarely seen and even more rarely tasted, was the star of the line up – something unique to the tour.

Speyside Cooperage

With a busy afternoon ahead, we headed to the stop on the trip I’d most been looking forward to: a tour of the Speyside cooperage. I’m slightly obsesssive about casks and coopers, and have been meaning to visit since I first discovered that they were the only cooperage in the world with a visitor centre.

Watching coopers work is strangely mesmerising, and the tour lets you stare to your heart’s content. A viewing gallery stretches around the workshop and you can zone out and watch casks being disassembled and reassembled in a satisfyingly skilful manner. I had to be dragged away to make sure we made it to our final stop on time: Glen Moray.

Glen Moray

I’ve been a Glen Moray fan ever since I visited back in 2013. Since then, the distillery’s changed rather a lot. Of the tours during my couple of days on the Malt Whisky Trail, this was the most enlightening. Lots of new technology added to the more traditional distillery I visited before, creating a great mix of old and new.

Glen Moray: old and new stills

While you can find Glen Moray’s whiskies all over the world, the distillery holds a wealth of delights that aren’t quite as widespread as yet – interesting new releases as well as a few special editions that I’d not had a chance to try yet. Add to that a cask in the shop that I could fill my own bottle from – a very pink peated port cask – and it was the perfect tour to round out my trip.

More than just whisky

It may have only been a couple of days, but there was much more to my trip along The Trail than just whisky and distilleries. But tales of trading sandwich tips in the Aberlour church yard, my inspirational taxi ride with a cab driver turned author, and an evening of drinking with a Danish sailor (hi Lars!) will have to wait for another time.

It’s great to see the Malt Whisky Trail again and I’ll be stopping by next time I’m up in Speyside – I’ve still never been to Dallas Dhu, Benromach should have a new distillery exclusive bottling soon, and it’s a while since I’ve been to either Glenfiddich or Glen Grant. Any excuse to pop in and see whisky being made…

]]>http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/07/malt-whisky-trail/feed/07084Four Roses – two mashbills, five yeasts, ten whiskeyshttp://spiritedmatters.com/2017/07/four-roses-two-mashbills-five-yeasts-ten-whiskeys/
http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/07/four-roses-two-mashbills-five-yeasts-ten-whiskeys/#respondMon, 17 Jul 2017 07:42:21 +0000http://spiritedmatters.com/?p=7033Continue reading "Four Roses – two mashbills, five yeasts, ten whiskeys"]]>Every year, a new part of the distillation process or an ingredient seems to be ‘the most important bit’. Sometimes it’s the grain, sometimes it’s the water, sometimes it’s the stills, but almost every year the geekier whisky fans start talking about yeast – one of the key flavour creators in the whisky making process. And when it comes to yeast, there’s one distiller who does more than most – Four Roses.

In the beginning

The name Four Roses was trademarked in 1888 by Paul Jones Jr, a grocer who had moved his business from Atlanta, Georgia to Louisville, Kentucky a few years earlier. Jones claimed a history for the brand back to the 1860s, leading to suggestions that he may have acquired the name from Rufus M Rose, an Atlanta distiller who started producing a Rose Whiskey in 1867. However, the history is muddy, and changing marketing stories over the years have muddied things further.

After Jones died in the early 1890s, the company was taken over by his nephews. When Prohibition hit in the 1920s, the company bought the Frankfort Distilling Company and the Old Prentice distillery. While the distillery was shuttered, it was granted a license to supply its existing stocks of whiskey for medicinal purposes.

With a brand name that was known through Prohibition, Four Roses became very successful after the repeal. As the biggest selling bourbon in the USA from the 1930s onwards, it caught the eye of Canadian distilling giant Seagrams. Four Roses was bought by the company in 1943 and things soon changed.

Life under Seagram’s

Seagram’s was a blending company, and while that was great for its Canadian and Scottish whisky divisions, Four Roses didn’t quite fit the mould. The company introduced a blended whiskey alongside the bourbon, which sold well. Despite its continued popularity, the flagship bourbon was discontinued at the end of the 1950s. While Seagram’s continued to produce other bourbons, including Four Roses for the overseas market, Four Roses was relaunched in the USA solely as a blended whiskey.

In the USA, blended whiskey is quite a different thing to the more commonly known Scottish blends. You don’t often see them outside of the country for good reason – they’re generally not very good. With a minimum of 20% straight whiskey, and the rest made up of neutral spirit and other whiskey, they’re some of the most bottom shelf bottles available. While the original Four Roses blend was all whiskey, the relaunched version was far from it. With two thirds of the recipe neutral spirits, it was a much lower quality product and customers soon realised.

This pretty much destroyed the Four Roses name in the USA. To make matters even worse, Four Roses was hugely popular overseas – a great whiskey that you couldn’t buy in the country where it was made.

Four Roses returns

At the end of the 1990s, Seagram’s collapsed and its drinks brands were sold. They ended up in various hands, and Four Roses went to Japanese drinks company Kirin – with Four Roses already a best-selling brand in Japan and Europe, it made perfect sense for them to grab it. In 2004 Kirin relaunched the flagship bourbon in the USA, the first time it had been available on home soil for more than 40 years.

Since then, Four Roses has gone from strength to strength. The distillery now has numerous awards under its belt, and the core range of whiskeys is a benchmark for bourbon around the world.

Two mashbills, five yeasts, ten whiskeys

Despite distancing itself from the dark days of the Four Roses blend, one part of production still harks back to those days – the distillery’s different recipes.

Four Roses doesn’t produce just one whiskey at its distillery, it makes ten. With two different grain recipes – mashbills – and five strains of yeast, the distillery has a wide range of different whiskeys to play with, and different combinations make up the various releases.

The recipes

To explain the ten recipes, Four Roses uses a four-letter code::

[Distillery code] [Mash bill code] [Whisky type code] [Yeast code]

These days, the only distillery is Old Prentice (O) and the only type of whiskey is Straight Bourbon (S), making the codes a little simpler to pull apart.

The two mashbills are:

E – medium-rye mashbill: 75% corn, 20% rye, 5% malt

B – high-rye mashbill: 60% corn, 35% rye, 5% malt

The yeast codes are:

O – rich and fruity flavours

K – lightly spicy

F – herbal character

Q – floral character

V – delicate fruit

For example, a whiskey made from the medium-rye mashbill and the rich and fruity yeast would be referred to as OESO. High-rye and delicately fruity yeast: OBSV. And so on.

The regular Four Roses Yellow Label uses all ten recipes, but the Small Batch uses just the K and O yeasts with both mashbills (four recipes: OESK, OESO, OBSK and OBSO) and the Single Barrel is all OBSV. To find the other recipes on their own, you need to keep an eye out for private and store-picked single cask bottlings. Fortunately Four Roses is popular enough that while it’s not easy to find all ten, they are all out in the wild.

Why so many recipes?

When Seagram’s bought Four Roses in 1943, they didn’t stop there, buying as many as fourteen other distilleries at the same time according to some sources. This not only included Four Roses but also four other distilleries in Kentucky, each with its own distinct character. Seagram’s standardised on two mashbills across all five distilleries, giving ten whiskeys. These were used to create the various bourbons and blended whiskeys that came out of the Seagram’s Kentucky operation, including Four Roses.

These days only one of the five distilleries still makes whiskey:

Old Prentice Distillery, the Four Roses distillery. Still in production.

I’ve heard two stories as to why there are now five different yeasts used at Four Roses:

as the distilleries closed, the Seagrams research division found yeasts that would create whiskey of a character that matched the closed locations.

as the distilleries closed, their unique yeast strains were transplanted to other distilleries, continuing the supply of each of the ten recipes.

Whichever story is true, here’s how the yeasts seem to match up with the distilleries:

O – Old Prentice

K – Old Lewis Hunter/Cynthiana (or maybe a second yeast used at Old Prentice)

F – Old Henry McKenna/Fairfield

Q – Athertonville

V – Calvert

As with most stories from Bourbon country, there are holes and details that don’t quite make sense. Four Roses’s history has numerous different versions, and the company has been spinning yarns since the day it was founded. In the end, it’s the whiskey that matters – long may the stories continue.

Thanks to brand ambassadors Benji Purslow and Dan Priseman for putting up with my questions. There’s also a Diffordsguide article digging into the company’s history that gave me some more leads to work from.

]]>http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/07/four-roses-two-mashbills-five-yeasts-ten-whiskeys/feed/07033Port Charlotte Transparency and the Bruichladdich Feis Ile Masterclasshttp://spiritedmatters.com/2017/06/port-charlotte-transparency-bruichladdich-feis-ile-masterclass/
http://spiritedmatters.com/2017/06/port-charlotte-transparency-bruichladdich-feis-ile-masterclass/#respondWed, 21 Jun 2017 06:41:44 +0000http://spiritedmatters.com/?p=7062Continue reading "Port Charlotte Transparency and the Bruichladdich Feis Ile Masterclass"]]>One of the most coveted tickets of the yearly Islay Festival (Feis Ile) is the Bruichladdich Feis Ile Masterclass – a chance for a few hundred of the distillery’s biggest fans to try not only the yearly festival bottling, but also taste hidden delights from deep in the well-stocked warehouses. This year, I finally made it along.

While the masterclass was known for years as raucous affair, thanks to retired distilling director Jim McEwan’s table-mounting toasts and rabble-rousing calls to arms, things have become more contemplative since new head distiller Adam Hannett took over in 2016. On occasion, this year’s instalment felt more like a TED talk than an old school whisky-flinging tasting, and it was all the better for it.

Bruichladdich has been a confused producer since its reopening in 2000, but the past few years have seen the distillery begin to calm down and consolidate. Gone are the endless limited editions, replaced by a high-quality and easily available core range, with an occasional special bottling still popping up to keep the fans happy. The distillery’s warehouses are still filled with gems, and Adam’s tasting dug deep into the racks to find special whiskies, as well as looking at experiments and potential future releases.

If you want to follow along at home, here’s the video of the whole thing:

Whisky 1 – Prototype Bruichladdich Black Art

The regular Bruichladdich Black Art bottlings were very much Jim McEwan’s playground. A multi-vintage release combining a range of different types of cask, revealing nothing other than its vintage and age. With Jim gone, Adam Hannett has taken over its creation, with a classically Bruichladdich handover story: before he retired, McEwan went to see Adam and handed him the recipe for the next edition of Black Art, but when it came to putting the whisky together, Adam tore up the recipe and came up with his own. As he said at the tasting:

‘If Jim has taught me anything, it’s do your own thing’

This prototype for the next edition was the usual secret mix of casks, with the youngest whisky in the mix from 1990.

Palate: Rich and buttery both on the palate and in texture. The mintyness returned, and Murray Mints lead the charge into a bowl of fruit salad: mango, apple and pineapple. Blowtorched brioche sandwiches thick with butter and brown sugar followed, getting richer and turning into fruit cake with sweet butter icing. Darker notes of singed raisins, charcoal and unsweetened blackcurrant jam balanced out sticky dates.

Finish: Butter and black pepper to start, fading through sharp green apple before disappearing in a puff of seaspray ozone. Touches of anise and sweet oak remained.

Whisky 2 – ‘The Ultimate Bruichladdich Multi-Vintage’

The flagship Laddie Classic is a mixture of whiskies from over the years, starting from 2005. While putting together a batch, Adam wondered what would happen if he batched together whiskies from all the decades they had in the warehouse. The result was this bourbon-matured (legally) 7-year-old dram containing whisky from across five decades of product: 1970, 1985, 1992, 2001 and 2010.

Nose: Mango and finely ground black pepper to start, with a background of butter icing. Big fruit developed, with more mango sat alongside sweet and sour apples and poached pears. Woody spice rolled in: nutmeg and cinnamon with polished oak boards and freshly sawn oak logs. Marzipan touches appeared after a few minutes of swirling the whisky around the glass.

Palate: Icing sugar and cream diving into a pool of dark fruit and spice. Sweet sultanas and toasted mixed peel were balanced out by charcoal and a touch of barrel char bitterness.

Whisky 3 – Old and Rare Bruichladdich

This whisky was a combination of two vintages, all distilled before the distillery was taken over the by the current owners. First was 1986, the same vintage as the first whisky that Adam presented with Jim McEwan at a masterclass. The distillery doesn’t have much spirit from 1986 and all of the casks are sherry butts. In classic Bruichladdich fashion, they didn’t leave the whisky alone and in 2012 they reracked it into fresh Pedro Ximenez sherry casks.

The other element of the whisky is from 1984. This time, the spirit was matured solely in refill ex-bourbon casks, before being reracked in 2012 to fresh bourbon casks.

Finish: Loads of spice followed by stewed apple and a big smack of fruit – concentrated smoothies slowly fading away.

Whisky 4 – Port Charlotte Transparency

The Feis Ile 2017 release. Bruichladdich’s overriding message over the past couple of years has been transparency, jumping off the back of Compass Box’s campaign. You can now enter the batch number of some of the distillery’s whiskies into the website to get back a complete rundown of the casks that went into the batch. This approach exploits the wording of the EU regulations that forbid advertising the ages of anything but the youngest whisky in a batch – if the customer asks for the information, everything seems to be alright. You can find more details on the Laddie blog.

I don’t have a bottle so can’t look up the details and am going on secondhand information as to what’s in the recipe. It’s 12 casks of spirit distilled between 2002 and 2004, a mix of bourbon and sherry casks with a few other Laddie specials in the mix: bourbon finished in Pauillac, full-term Sauternes, Sauternes finish and a vatting of sherry, wine and bourbon casks finished in refill bourbon.

Nose: Overripe mango and pineapple, high butter slathered on Sherbet Dip Dabs, incense and sugar crusted fruit cake (Mr Kipling’s Country Slices) drizzled with orange-zest-infused cream. Under all that was a slab of stony minerality, hints of sea breeze, fresh peat smoke and muddy earth.

Finish: Cooling spice and herbs: mint and menthol. Char rolled in with some cinnamon heat and more minty hints.

Whisky 5 – Port Charlotte Islay Barley

This being the warehouse tasting, this wasn’t just any old PC Islay barley, instead being fully matured in Sauternes casks. It was 5 years old and 64.3% ABV – stronger than the spirit most distilleries put in a cask, as Bruichladdich fill theirs at still strength:

‘We do not add water to our spirit before we put it in casks because we don’t think there’s much point in maturing water. We want to mature whisky.’

Nose: Smoky yellow and green jelly babies with gravel, fresh ferns and smouldering green leaves. Fruit then jumps in with a vengeance, with fruit gums, fruit salad chews and fragrant orange peel bursting out of the glass. A drop of water calms things down and reveals more of the whisky’s earthier side: twigs and pine. Dark cocoa and grainy chocolate brownies bring up the rear.

Whisky 6 – ‘Essentially the next edition of Octomore’

One of the more simple whiskies on the mat, but also one of the most anticipated. A bourbon-cask-matured five-year-old Octomore, distilled in December 2011 and peated to ‘just’ 150ppm. All of the .1 releases of Octomore are five years old and matured in bourbon casks – ‘This could be Octomore 08.1,’ said Adam.

Palate: Grain-forward and ashy to start – like munching on a handful of Octomore-spec barley. However, once you get beyond that, there’s much more going on: smoky liquorice, stewed apple, dark chocolate and chocolate malt, and layers of oaky spice.

Finish: A smack of unexpected fruit quickly fades, leading to damp peat smoke and ash.

Whisky 7 – ‘What if?’

A contemplative dram to finish, looking at the start of most Bruichladdich products – ‘What if we did this with a whisky?’. This harks back to 3D3, Waves and Peat, whiskies that mixed together the different makes that Bruichladdich produces. This was a mixture of Bruichladdich (unpeated), Port Charlotte (lots of peat) and Octomore (stupid amounts of peat), combining a range of different cask types.

The oldest whisky in the mix was Bruichladdich 1990 matured in Fernando de Castilla PX casks. The youngest was 2010 Sauternes-matured Octomore. The only other component Adam revealed, was some 2003 Port Charlotte.

Adam’s plan for the dram was simple:

‘If this was going to be your first taste of Islay whisky, this is how I’d want it to taste’.